thanksgiving

Pie is pie is pie at every Thanksgiving dinner. But if you want to put a fun and colorful spin on your Thanksgiving dessert, this will surely have your guests in awe. This ombré pie crust is even better than your average #extra dessert because it’s colored with 100% natural food coloring made from vegetables. You can cheat and dye the crust with some store-bought dye, but is it as impressive? Nope. And because it’s so simple to make, you have no excuse.

You can use any oven-baked pie recipe you like. Here, I made a lemon chiffon pie recipe that I love and found online. Tricky part is that it’s a non-bake pie, but I’ve tweaked it to make sure it’ll bake properly. This recipe makes about two 9 inch pie crusts, enough for the bottom pie crust and to create the design on top.

Ingredients:

Pie Crust:

2 1/2 cups all-purpose unbleached flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter (chilled and cubed)

1/4 cup water

Food Coloring:

2 medium beets

1 large carrot

2 tablespoons water

Directions:

Finely dice the carrot and add to the food processor along with a tablespoon of water. Puree until smooth. This will be your orange/yellow food coloring dye.

Repeat with the beet. Only puree it until the beet is finely minced, but not mushy. Because the color of the beet is so potent and I found it hard to completely puree it without it being too watery, you’ll squeeze the color out of the pulp with a paper towel. Place aside.

Combine flour, salt, and cubed butter into a food processor. Pulse until you get a crumb-like consistency.

Dump the mixture into a bowl leaving 1/2 of the mixture in the food processor. Add the 1/4 cup of water or until the dough just becomes a ball. This will be the pie crust bottom layer. Add flour or water as needed.

Pour 1/8 of the crumb mixture into the food processor. Instead of using water, use 3/4 of the carrot puree to combine the mixture. Add the carrot puree until the dough is thoroughly combined and forms a ball. You may get closer to a yellow color rather than orange. You don’t want to add too much dye or the dough will be too wet.

Pour another 1/8 of the crumb mixture into the food processor. Take the beet puree and place inside a clean paper towel. Squeeze the juice out of the beet into the food processor. Combine the dough until it forms a ball.

Now you have two colors! With the other 2/8 of the mixture, you can split the orange puree and beet juice to get colors in the middle of the two to create the ombré effect. Place it in the fridge for at least 4 hours.

After you’ve laid out the bottom layer pie crust and added your pie filling, roll out the colored pie crust and cut with a cookie cutter. I used a leaf pie cookie cutter I bought from Sur La Table. *Fun fact* I had to drive really far to get this cookie cutter and I arrived right at closing. They had already closed their doors. I had to call twice to make them open it and let me buy it 🙂 I was that desperate.

Layer the leafs as you’d like and done!

Since I made mine a little early, I decided to freeze it and will bake it day of Thanksgiving. Hope you enjoyed this recipe. If you end up making it, I’d love to see it. Make sure you hashtag #hairtieneeded! Happy and safe Thanksgiving!

My “thankful” Banner: This was a fun little project to put together and the results are amazing. How cute is this?! Because I already had the twine and mini clothespins on hand, this DIY only cost $3 dollars to make! If that’s not a…

November 25, 2015

About Me

I'm Karen Thi
This is a place where I share the stories of my travel, thoughts, and passions.